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Facsimile Dust Jackets L.L.C.

Suppose you've got a great old book but your great old book does not have a dust jacket.

Facsimile Dust Jackets has over 4,000 dust jackets ready to ship to the book collector not happy with their bare, unjacketed book. No book should sit on the shelf naked, its wear and tear visible to all. Maybe your book has an unsightly water stain on the spine, or dried what looks like blood beneath the title on the front cover. Or crusty impacted boogers on the back! Yuck. Who wants to hold or display or show off books looking like that?

For $22.00, the good folks at Facsimile Dust Jackets will send you a killer looking copy of the original dust jacket replete with retro artwork so beloved by bibliophiles everywhere.

I am neither related to the makers and distributors of Facsimile Dust Jackets, nor being paid by them for this free advertisement. I just think this idea of providing exact replicate dust jackets, while pricey at $22 a pop, is a fantastic idea nonetheless. I wish I'd thought of it first.

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"The Concentration City" (1957) is one Hell of a story. That Ballard named his leads Franz and Gregson and set certain bureaucratic procedural crime dramas around them made me think immediately of The Metamorphosis, but I'm not positive Ballard was intentionally riffing off Kafka here. And regarding Concentration City's history there's multiple mentions to a time "before the Foundation" millions of years ago, which seems to be a gracious nod in Isaac Asimov's direction.

Franz aims to fly in Concentration City (it was a dream he had) but there's really no room to fly in a city that has no open air space -- not even for a single bird. Any available space is already occupied with construction. So he hatches a plan with Gregson not so much to escape Concentration City but to ride the commuter train, a "Supersleeper" that connects the various Sectors and Federations of the city, West for as long as necessary in order to find "Free …

Considering William Sansom's short fiction was once widely anthologized in frighteningly titled story collections (e.g., London Tales of Terror, Ghosts in Country Houses, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, as well as several installments of The Pan Book of Horror Stories), with a novel named The Body, readers already acquainted with his better known, more diminutive, phantasmal forebears, could understandably conclude that Sansom's first novel The Body was likewise macabre. Honest mistake, that. And perhaps also disappointing for those mystic connoisseurs of the obscure with a taste for Sansom's peculiar style of understated extravagance -- a style similar to yet not quite as distilled as that of those refined denizens of the fin de siècle, nor as baroque as the later Lovecraft crowds he was often lumped in with (peruse any of the table of contents of one of the dozens of anthologies Sansom contributed to in order to better see my point) -- who naturall…

I'm proceeding slowly through The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard in 2013, and hope to have at least something to share on each story eventually. There's potential spoilers below. First story up for study is "Prima Belladonna" from 1956, a story originally collected in Vermillion Sands.

"Prima Belladonna" is told by an unnamed narrator as a reminiscence. A recollection of a long-ago, idealized time known in his culture's history as "The Recess," that "world slump of boredom, lethargyand high summer..." that lasted for a decade. People worked only a few hours per day during this era of ennui, assuming our unnamed leading man is any indicator of the cultural norm, spending their hours not in labor but instead on balconies with beer, playing i-Go, a game described as "decelerated chess," as if chess (for the lay person, not a pro) wasn't slow enough already.

The majority of the material for this post is taken from Contemporary Novelists, 3rd Ed., Edited by James Vinson, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1982

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914-1987)

There's only eight books of K.A. Abbas cataloged in LibraryThing (five or six different works). He's virtually forgotten in the United States, though still revered in Indian literary circles.

On highbrow literary critics in India, Abbas said they "have sometimes sneeringly labelled my novels and short stories as 'mere journalese'. The fact that most of them are inspired by aspects of the contemporary historical reality, as sometimes chronicled in the press, is sufficient to put them beyond the pale of literary creation.

"I have no quarrel with the critics. Maybe I am an unredeemed journalist and reporter, masquerading as a writer of fiction. But I have always believed that while the inner life of man undoubtedly is, and should be, the primary concern of literature, thi…

The most intriguing parts of Yngwie J. Malmsteen's new memoir, Relentless, are his childhood and adolescence accounts of his musical maturation in Sweden. Like most artistic geniuses, he was completely obsessed early on. He'd forget to eat he was so consumed with his guitar. When he saw Jimi Hendrix set fire to his stratocaster on one of the two television channels he could watch in Stockholm, he was hooked. When he heard Deep Purple's Fireball album a year later, he was ablaze himself with an inimitable passion for the electric guitar that could keep him awake all night without the aid of amphetamines. Had it not been for his mother's sacrifices and interest in classical music, Yngwie might have been just another dime-a-dozen hard rock guitarist to arrive on the scene in the early 1980s, soon to disappear. But he listened repeatedly to his Mom's and older sister's records, and then one day he chanced on one of those two television channels, a documentar…

Life at Happy Knoll is an understated satire by a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist I suspect few readers bother reading today. Though in his day, around the time he won the 1938 Pulitzer for The Late George Apley, he was commercially successful and critically well received. So it's a minor shame that, not dusting off the cobwebs of a forgotten novel by John P. Marquand every now and then, in order to enjoy his mid-century skewering of double-talking high society WASPs. Of folks fixated on protecting their precious domestic insularity and supremely shallow social values -- common themes in Marquand's novels and especially Life at Happy Knoll -- that made his primarily WASP audience perhaps chuckle and gasp simultaneously in discomfiting recognition of itself.

Happy Knoll and Hard Hollow country clubs are in a constant letter writing battle (that's all the novel is -- the correspondence of rival boards of governors pandering to potential new members to join their country …

I'm seeing, sensing, absorbing the preternatural prescience and all-too-real surrealism of J.G. Ballard. In one of his first published short stories, for instance, his gem "Escapement" (1956), a man watching the tele with his wife experiences a bizarre hiccup in time's immutable ticktock, during which he discovers himself reliving the same fifteen minute span from 9:00-9:15 P.M. over and over again. As if time were trapped on a cassette tape that never stopped playing.

The television show our increasingly incredulous man is watching keeps repeating itself, but his wife doesn't even notice! In fact, while her husband can't get past 9:15, it's almost 10:00 P.M. for her. Our man tries switching channels to escape. Same result: Rewind. He calls a quiz show to tell them he knows the question they're going to ask in order to try and convince somebody — anybody — that something very strange is going on with the clocks, that they're stuck in this ma…

Beginning with the first sentence of Infinite Jest, Wallace is outlining some of its core themes: Detachment, disembodiment, depersonalization, all resulting in disorientation -- a possible source, if I may borrow my LT friend, zenomax's, idea -- of the "realities behind the realities" in Infinite Jest.

Seated at the conference table for his admissions interview to get into Univ. of AZ, Hal Incandenza, in observing the three Deans seated nearby, does not "know which face belongs to whom." He is uncertain of basic points of reference, where his position is in relation to others, for instance: CTs (his surrogate mouthpiece) location may be in the room, seated "to what I hope is my immediate right" (boldness mine). Hope? Hal doesn't know for sure. Is Hal really "in here," or deceiving himself?

Hal says he is "in here" -- in the conference room -- but he isn't confident nor in control of his body: "Ibelieve I appear n…

As masterfully crafted as Stanley Kubrick's version of 2001: A Space Odyssey is, it's too slow and too quiet at times for my taste. Watching 2001: A Space Odyssey is like attending an art gallery showcasing outer space paintings, only the movie camera moves even slower from shot to shot than even the most seemingly statuesque-like of minimal, millimeterish movements made by hoity-toity art aficionados mesmerized by the paintings inside the gallery. Do those art geeks inside galleries ever actually move, standing enraptured (or comatose) before a painting? If they do, you'd need to set up some time-lapse photography to catch their miniscule movements, as infrequent as a glacier's, it seems.
Yeah, it's a slow moving movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Don't get me wrong, though, I like 2001. In fact, certain scenes in the film are all-time favorites of mine. Like the scene where the prehistoric man (Homo erectus?) is going all ape having discovered (presumably) …

Found The Hucksters by Frederic Wakeman last month at the Bookman in Orange. The dust jacket design caught my eye. Though the cover designer's signature got torn off at the bottom right corner as you can see below, a friend was able to quickly identify it as one of the covers from the impressive portfolio of Arthur Hawkins, Jr., one of the finest cover artists, come to find out, of the 1930s and 1940s. Simply had to have The Hucksters, solely because of its book cover, even though I knew next to nothing about it. I'm afraid I did judge this book by its cover — and bought it. The intriguing biography of the author on the back cover helped sell the book for me, too: "Until his first book, SHORE LEAVE, was published, Frederic Wakeman belonged to that large army of professional writers who never see their names in print. They are the reporters, the writers of advertising and of radio scripts. In New York you see them leave their advertising agency offices on Park or M…